Arch Linux Users With Intel Graphics Can Begin Enjoying A Flicker-Free Boot

It looks like the recent efforts led by Red Hat / Fedora on providing a flicker-free Linux boot experience and thanks to their upstream-focused approach is starting to pay off for the other desktop Linux distributions... A flicker-free boot experience can now be achieved on Arch Linux with the latest packages, assuming you don't have any quirky hardware.

A Phoronix reader reported in earlier today that Arch Linux as of the 4.19.8-arch1-1-ARCH kernel is working out well for the seamless/flicker-free boot experience. The caveat though -- like with Fedora -- is that it only works with Intel graphics hardware/driver for now and does require setting the "i915.fastboot=1" kernel module parameter.

Previously this user had to use "quiet splash vt.global_cursor_default=0 rd.loglevel=0 systemd.show_status=false rd.udev.log-priority=0 udev.log-priority=0" for trying to achieve a similar boot experience.

It doesn't appear to have yet worked its way into Arch, but Red Hat also recently landed Plymouth improvements for even tighter integration on modern Intel UEFI systems (a Fedora video also in that aforelinked article).

The non-rolling-release Linux distributions should begin seeing the fruits of this open-source work in their 2019 updates.